Modern Art Oxford | Dr Bridget Crone on Mona Hatoum's early performance work

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Crone, Bridget. 2016. 'Modern Art Oxford | Dr Bridget Crone on Mona Hatoum's early performance work'. In: Re-Visit: 1998 / Mona Hatoum. Modern Art Oxford, United Kingdom. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Official URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKe3ge_QY00

Abstract or Description

In this talk, I will focus on Mona Hatoum’s early work encompassing performance and video. This is work that was mostly produced during the years 1980-88, and I will select a number of these works to focus upon rather than giving an exhaustive overview.

My interest lies within the conjoining of the body and image, or the ambivalences between body and image in the world today. Principally, in my work, I am concerned with the relationship or blurring of the boundaries between the body and the image in contemporary performance and / or moving image practices. Thinking about this today is to consider the way in which digital or post-digital technologies and modes of surveillance act to produce the body as a kind of image, so that our experience of the body might become dematerialised – an experience that occurs through the image or through the virtual, on the one hand. On the other hand, our experience of the image might be bodily, that is to say that we might feel the image as someone like Brian Massumi has suggested through his notion of affective modulation; in his study of the US Terror Alert System where colour affects (or controls) the response of individual bodies.

So, today I want to test out some of these interests in relation to Hatoum’s early work which very interestingly explores the limits of the body and of the imaging technologies of the time – for example, in works such as So much I wanted to say (1981) in which a live performance is transmitted via satellite and the artist’s voice via the telephone. But more on this later.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)

Keywords:

Mona Hatoum

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